After 37 years at the BBC Philip Hayton has quit over ‘differences’ between him and the Lovely Kate Silverton, with whom despite being my vote for rear of and spectacle wearer of the year, he had ‘incompatibility’ issues. Yikes! Personally I think she did a grand job standing in for Kaplinski on Breakfast when she was off on her honeymoon.

Look at this picture off the wire though… It’s annotation reads: Handout photo of news-reader Philip Hayton and file PA photo of colleague Kate Silverton dated 20/09/1987 and 28/04/2005 respectively. 1987! Could whoever put this together not of found a better image of the man?! Nearly a decade old and black and white no less. Contrast that with ‘Our Kate’ at some charity awards do looking ravishing and every bit the modern woman. Ahh the joys of office politics coupled with the lies of picture editing…

Saturday afternoon me and my camera went out a wandering round Crystal Palace park. Photography is a bit like fishing, sometimes you don’t get anything, sometimes you get something and throw it back, and sometimes you get something great to mount and hang over the fireplace.

It was with this in mind that I went out ‘carte blanche’ hoping to find something of interest to shoot. After loosening up the old trigger finger on the dinosaurs (Check the Doctor Who connection?) I found this guy playing his saxophone under the sports centre walkway as it gave really good acoustics. He talked about the fact that people always thought he was busking, when all he was doing was playing scales. Sometimes exploring the ruins of the Crystal Palace you feel like a modern day Howard Carter.

Well we won ’em. It was an interesting day at work, keeping an eye on the wires, and planning our response. As Martin details on currybet.net, we’ve been making greater use of the sport feeds over the past weekend, to keep users up to date on what was happening on each day of the final test. I think the nation’s new found zeal for cricket warranted this, I doubt we’d do it every weekend, as we’d probably get a lot of ‘I hate sport’ mails. As I’ve seen before, some people just aren’t interested. Also during the build up, we dropped in a couple of picture promo’s at lunchtime just to catch the sandwich surfers. These took the form of ‘tension’ and build up, offering fans some form of sport/cricket distraction countdown as they waited for the first day of the final test. 3 days to go [html][jpg], 2 days to go [html][jpg], 1 day to go [html][jpg]

Anyway, the ‘win’ treatment, (and believe me these plans were nearly thrown out of the window at lunchtime as it looked like Australia might actually make a comeback) went live the second the umpires lifted the bails, and I’m really pleased with it. I picked Pietersen as the main focus as he’d produced an astounding century, and more than made up for 6 dropped catches.

However, here’s some of the other options I’d prepared over the course of the day.
1.

2.

3.

Also the tweak of the ‘m’ in home to a set of wickets was quite fun, originally I’d made the ‘o’ a cricket ball, but felt this a bit to obvious and googley, changing the ‘m’ is probably still a bit googley, but is much more subtle and somehow nicer, calmer almost. Plus the ‘m’ lends itself so well to wickets that the temptation was too much. Here’s the ‘o’ versions

So in all, a good Ashes, we’ve yet to see the customer feedback, but from my point of view the use off the sports feeds has been a great help, it’s taken so much pressure of my team so that we can concentrate on stuff like the treatment this evening, rather than using generic style promos over the weekend. Now moving forward we need to remember that sport has it’s own box on the homepage, and how can we make that work harder on a Saturday to Saturday basis?

As you may know my thoughts on the whole Citizen Journalist debate were recently published in the BJP letters page (see below). It prompted a pompous and sarcastic response by Barry Beattie, Chairman, Freelance Division, Chartered Institute of Journalists.

He begins by quoting my comments, then goes onOne almost hears the combined shrieks of amazement from [his] executives [at] White City HQ (or is it Haight Ashbury these days?) at anyone who actually has the temerity to expect payment for material used.

(Haight Ashbury – ho ho ho!) He continues… The BBC’s latest website ‘scam’ is to try to get amateurs to send in their mobile phone pictures of the Notting Hill Carnival! Nevertheless, in the atmosphere of the BBC’s new age of enlightenment, I’m thinking of applying for the position of ‘Citizen Online picture editor. Of course in the sprit of ‘sharing experiences’ I would not wish to be paid for my efforts, and I’m sure Mr Webb would gracefully step aside confident in the knowledge that the BBC is a ‘porous institution’ and would soon find him something else to do. He then describes some recent case where two girls took phone pictures in court and were found in contempt, before rounding off with a final dig at me…

Oooh, hangbags at dawn! Well, here’s what I’m planning to do… in the sprit of openness and transparency, I’m going to contact Barry today and see if he’s up for meeting me for a drink and discuss the subject further in a calm professional manner… Stay tuned to find out what happens.